NewU Pt. 05

"Evo?"

"Oh, yeah. Evo, that's what we call ourselves. Evolution, Evo, genius, right?" Charlotte shook her head with a roll of her eyes. "Anyway, so if one Evo wanted to hurt another, it must be done in the mind. You try to block the person you are targeting; then try to get into their minds to do the damage. If the target detects you, they can gauge your intent and stand their ground -- if they think they can win -- or escape. It's also a way for the attacker to size up the target, they can still read them even though they are blocking them at the same time."

My understanding nod was interrupted by a thought, one doubtless provided by Jeeves. "Wait. If that's the case and I was blocking you, why couldn't I read you?"

Charlotte's brows furrowed almost immediately. "You couldn't read me either?"

"No. You were just a... void." I shrugged, struggling to find the last word.

Charlotte sat in silence for a minute, her eyes fixed on an invisible point on the ground between us, her brows locked in thought. "... shit."

"What?"

"I need you to think." She said slowly. "How did Marco react when you first came out of your room after your awakening? You remember that sudden surge of power? How did he act?"

I cast my mind back before answering. "Actually, now I think about it, he was a little freaked out. I had to calm him down, he looked like he was ready to bolt."

Charlotte's face lit up in a dazzlingly lyrical giggle; it was like her every feature was bathed in light. Her eyes danced, and her full lips parted and bouncing as she laughed. In that moment, not Venus, Aphrodite, nor Helen of Troy could have held a candle to Charlotte's beauty. I was stunned into awed silence.

"Hooo," she panted as her laughter finally died down, a hand coming up to dab underneath one of her eyes, "What I would've given to have seen that." She chuckled again before calming herself. "Ok, so the only explanation is that you are ridiculously powerful."

I could only squint in confused silence as she continued.

"A mind isn't just a room, and there is no way it can be represented as one." She explained slowly. "What Marco called his Library is just a way for us to access our abilities. The mind, in its entirety, is infinitely more complex than that. It is a hive of activity. It contains everything from controlling our breathing, heartbeat, and nervous system, directing our physical movements to storing and accessing memories. From understanding the relationships with the people in our lives, processing knowledge, to processing our understanding of concepts fundamental to life, like financial value and the passage of time. There are so many facets that it cannot be manifested in a single room. Instead, it creates a city. If the room is our mind's manifestation of our abilities, the city is its manifestation of itself."

I would be lying if I said I was following any of this at this point. The look on my face was obviously giving it away.

"Each city has a city wall to defend itself from attack." She explained after a short but amused pause. "Some small and weak, others are tall and impenetrable." Somehow my mind flashed back to the palisade of stacked twigs that guarded Marco's mind against mine when my powers were first awakened. "The size of your wall depends on the strength of your ability. So, in our case, the only explanation is that your walls were too strong for me to breach and read you without you letting me, and you couldn't read me because you don't know how."

Jeeves, are you following any of this.

"In a manner of speaking, yes, Sir. I can't tell you if what she is saying is true or not, but there is a certain logic to it."

"So, just to make sure I'm getting this," I said with a sceptical frown. "There is an entire city in your head and one in mine too."

"Well, we are in our heads, so technically our cities are here. But yes." She said with a smirk. I made an exaggerated gesture of looking around with a dramatically confused look of my face, turning in my chair to peer over my shoulder before facing Charlotte again.

"Are they, like, far away or something?" I asked in humorous sarcasm.

"Actually, mine is right behind me. You can't see it because I'm still blocking you. I'm assuming yours is somewhere behind you as well."

"Ah." I looked back over my shoulder.

There was a long pause as I turned back to face the grinning beauty in front of me. With her legs crossed in the deck chair, her arms laid out on the rests, and the martini glass balanced between her delicate fingers. She gave off an air of unquantifiable confidence, maybe even arrogance. The shit-eating grin on her face was doing nothing to assuage the look. However, her eyes were staring back into mine with ferocious intensity, totally at odds with the curl of her wet and shining lips.

"Ok. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and trust you." She said as face grew more serious. "Allowing someone into your city is an incredibly intimate act for an Evo; you are literally letting someone into your mind. It is far more intimate than sex. But you could have done some god-awful things to Becky and Philippa, and you didn't, I checked. So, I'm going to trust you. But remember, I am a nurse. Fuck me over, and I will castrate you and make it look like an accident." Her threat was accompanied by a playful, albeit nervous smile as she stood from her seat, silently waiting for me to do the same and stepping towards me when I was I upright. She reached out her hand for mine. "Physical touch for Evos is kind of a gateway. I don't mean like an accident brush, but a conscious, willing touch is basically a way for us to..." she seemed to be struggling to find the words "... I don't know, accept that we are the same, and mean each other no harm."

Our fingers brushed together. A spark of something, a warm tingle, emanated from my hand and up my arm to my very core. It wasn't like Marco, where I could see every aspect of his life, but I instinctively and instantly knew that Charlotte was a friend. She was more than capable of inflicting both physical and mental harm upon me but was utterly devoid of the will. It was like someone putting a gun to your head but knowing -- absolutely knowing ­-- that they had no intention of pulling the trigger.

Judging by how her body and expression seemed to relax, she knew the same was true for me. We both let out a contented and relieved sigh as a medieval city, complete with high curtain walls, shimmered into existence behind her. She stepped beside me and turned to face it, both of us staring, only one of us trying to reset their jaw from its new home next to my feet.

It was beautiful, as far as a city could be, like something out of a movie. I knew enough about history to know that medieval cities were dank, odorous, and dangerous places in reality. But this was more like the idealized version you would see in movies such as The Lord of the Rings. It looked warm, friendly, almost inviting. Faded grey stones made up the 20ft high walls, beyond which, the tops of stone buildings could be made out above the ramparts and plumes of chimney smoke punctuated the clear blue sky. But dominating the skyline was the top of a mighty looking castle, its towers piercing the heavens at each of the four corners and a single, taller tower jutting up in the center. It looked like an off-grey version of the Disney castle I had seen in so many movies as a child. There was something distinctly fairytale about it all. It suited Charlotte perfectly, although I couldn't come up with a single reason why I thought that.

Her fingers curled around mine, snapping me out of my reverie. "C'mon." She said with a warm smile. "I'll show you around. It's been a while since I've had a man inside me." She finished with a wink and lead me towards the small gatehouse and into her city.

I'm not going to pretend to be able to remember all the intricacies of the conversation that flowed over the course of the next few hours. Charlotte explaining -- and in many cases, re-explaining -- how the city worked with a degree of patience that would make Mother Theresa blush in embarrassment. However, for the sake of expediency, I will try to summarize what I learned without the bumbling confusion that plagued those sun-filled and fondly remembered hours.

The tour of the city was an education in metaphors; every single building in the town had a purpose, a purpose that roughly translated into a function of the mind. The city clinic, a small, squat, thatched building nestled up against the walls on the western edge of town, was responsible for the body's ability to register pain and heal itself. The bank aided the understanding of value, risk, and reward. The forge was where the mind stored its knowledge on how to do manual tasks. Everything from changing a car tire to tying your shoelaces and the Library, an enormous building close to the center of town, housed all of Charlotte's knowledge. The school next door was where that knowledge was put into practical use. Training as a nurse for all those years was all well and good, but knowing how to do something and being able to actually do it were, apparently, two very different things.

The buildings in each person's city, according to Charlotte, changed depending on that person's life and needs. An engineer or a manual laborer, for example, would have a much higher dependency on the forge, meaning that the building would be larger and closer to the center of town. A person who had spent their whole lives dealing with chronic illness would require a larger clinic. But there were three buildings which, if I understood them correctly, were essential and central in everyone: The Market, the Palace, and the Well.

The Market, with the exchanging of goods and commodities, dealt with the body's core functions: breathing, heartbeat, dictating the intake of food, and so on. It was a bustling hive of activity with countless people carting goods between one store and another. Charlotte would explain that those people were representations of actual people in her life, a shadow -- if you will -- of the impression that person had left on her life and her mind. Everyone from vaguely remembered classmates, through the teachers and friends who had shaped her formative years, right up to the closest friends and family. All of them were represented as people inhabiting her city. None of them had any real purpose, but their presence brought life to the town in the same way that their presence had given meaning and value to Charlotte's life.

The Palace, the next of the three core buildings, was essentially the home of the conscious and subconscious mind. This governing facility monitored and controlled all aspects of the city. According to Charlotte, if I spent enough time wandering around in my own version of it, I would eventually find my bunker. It was another one of those buildings that was more of a fairytale representation of what a medieval fortress would have looked like- meant to look beautiful rather than to fill any real military or defensive purpose. Its five tall towers jutted into the sky like elegant fingers grasping at the heavens, almost silver in the bright sunlight. A large, marble-like staircase led to the main door. However, I got the impression from Charlotte's demeanor that going inside was a step too far for today's tour.

I was starting to see what Charlotte had meant when she talked about the intimacy of being inside her city. In a very literal sense, I was walking around the deepest recesses of her mind. She may have been friends with Becky and Philippa for years, but an hour of walking around her city would allow me to know her on a much deeper level than even her closest family. It was a staggering amount of trust to put into someone. For a normal person, sex was about as intimate as a physical activity could get; one person being inside another, sharing DNA, it was the closest they could be to being a single entity. This was so much more. Her entire being was open to me. It was only her trust in me that told her that I would not use that information to my own advantage, or worse, do anything that could, literally, damage her mind. The Palace was the physical manifestation of that and was, at this point, off-limits.

The last of the three buildings was the Well. The Well represented an Evo's power. The depth of the Well determined the strength of one's abilities, it was from this Well that all the gifts and abilities that our powers gave us, drew their strength. Charlotte, Marco, and, I assumed, all of the other adult Evo's had been used to their powers for the majority of their lives. On the other hand, I was still getting used to differences between my old life and my new one. So, I was surprised beyond my ability to describe, when the Well turned out to be just that: a small stone circle, descending into darkness. I got the metaphor, a place from which her power was drawn, but for such a drastic difference it made to a person's life, I guess I expected more.

All of these buildings came in to play when you looked at it from the perspective of Duelling. The purpose of a duel was to gain access into someone's city, either through brute force and literally going through the walls, or through some form of subterfuge, going over them, under them, convincing the person to grant you entrance and then betraying them, and so on. Although Duelling was done as a sport amongst 'the club' -- as Charlotte called them -- in a hostile attack, that person could do a hell of a lot of damage depending on what buildings they chose to focus on.

She told me the story of someone who was Duelling for sport. The participants got a little too carried away, a fire was started, which quickly consumed the city's mustering field, and that person lost the ability to walk. If an attacker targeted the Well, they could drain a victim of their powers, attack the Palace and you could shut the mind off from the body and leave the victim in a 'locked-in' vegetative state. The destruction of the Market would kill a person outright; they would literally forget how to breathe. The Library could be raided for knowledge or memories. The school could be damaged to stop a victim from being able to use the knowledge they had gained and, in an attack which sounded very personal to me, new inhabitants could be added to the city, shadows of people whose only purpose was to cause mayhem. The literal definition of a mental illness.

If physically attacking an Evo in the real world was impossible for another, an attack on their mind was more than capable of causing unimaginable levels of harm. I was starting to understand why Charlotte had been so terrified when she first met me. The prospect of what could be done was certainly a sobering thought.

I couldn't tell you how long we wandered around her city, but a large portion of it was spent with our hands locked into each other's, fingers curled together. For an expression usually reserved for open lovers, it seemed like such a simple and unimportant act compared with the surroundings we found ourselves in. I wasn't the first who had been inside her city; there had been people who had beaten her at Duelling for sport and entered her city in triumph, despite Charlotte's apparent disdain for 'the club,' it was clear that this hadn't always been the case. She had fought them every step of the way, they had breached her walls, but none of them had been invited. I was the first. There was something indescribably flattering about that. There was one problem, though.

I had absolutely no idea how to return the gesture.

We had wandered back out of her city and found ourselves, once again, standing in the picturesque meadow where we had first arrived. With the exception of Charlotte's city -- and I had no real way of knowing which side of the town we had left -- there were no landscape markets to judge where we were in the meadow. Yet, I somehow instinctively knew that this was the place where we had been sat a few hours earlier. I was so convinced that I found myself looking around for the lawn chairs we had been sat on.

Now that I understood how the cities worked, I sort of knew, roughly, where mine should be, but instead, we found ourselves staring out at the vacant meadow. "Why can't we see it?" I asked simply as my eyes gave up wandering the wilderness and instead looked down at Charlotte's fingers still curled around mine.

"Honestly, I have no idea." She said, a concerned look painted over her exquisite features. "But I do have a theory."

"Care to share?"

There was a long pause, her eyes, like mine, fixed on our entwined fingers. "You're not a very trusting person, are you?"

I licked at my suddenly dry lips. The simple answer was no. My parents had taught me the folly of placing my trust in anyone. Only Jimmy had managed to fully ingratiate himself to me, and I still couldn't work out how he had managed to do that. I shook my head softly.

Charlotte nodded, a gentle but reassuring smile pulling at her lips. "You don't let people in," she said in a voice barely above a whisper. "In this case, that is manifested literally. Whether it is conscious or not, you are hiding your mind from me, not letting me in."

"I'm... I'm not doing it intentionally," I said weakly, giving her hand a soft squeeze.

"Oh, I know." She said warmly. "Our minds can come up with some pretty elaborate ways to protect us from harm, none of which we have any real control over." There was a pause as she turned to face me, I took a step to the side to meet her too. "I want you to kiss me."

"Sorry?"

"Just... Trust me."

The inches between us could have been miles for the intensity that suddenly filled each one. I could feel her heartbeat above the pounding of my own, my face struggling to suppress the shock as they gradually started to beat in sync, to beat as one. She leaned a little closer as I mirrored her movements, edging nearer to her as her eyes dropped closed, and her warm breath caressed the skin around my lips.

The first touch was soft, barely a touch at all, a brushing of her full lips against my dry ones. It was delicate, like the beat of a butterfly's wings, just long enough to inhale her breath and feel the warmth of her skin.

There was a pause. Then we melted into each other.

The second touch was not soft. It was passion, it was heat, her lips pressed into mine with the force of a long-lost lover, starved of intimacy since before she could remember. Her head tilted to one side as mine leaned to the other, pressing deeper into the kiss as our lips opened and our tongues met in that timeless dance.

This wasn't a simple kiss. I knew instinctively that this was not a kiss I would ever share with Becky. It was a melding of souls; I could feel her energy pouring into me, like an almost imperceptible tingle under the skin. I felt something open in me, and my energy flowed back into her. A soft, almost whimpered moan pushed past her tongue and out to my ears. My hand reached up to cup her cheek, my fingers teasing the skin on the hairline at the back of her neck, tangling in her hair as my thumb softly stroked the warm skin of her face. I poured myself into her, and she did the same to me. This was so much more than a kiss; it took the gateway of our touch from earlier to a whole new level. Her life, her character, her pride, her flaws, her insecurities, her very soul; I could see it all. At that moment, I loved her. I loved her more than I imagined it was possible for one person to love another. She knew everything there was to know about me and accepted me completely. I knew this without a word needing to be said. I knew just as much about her, and as our kiss pressed our bodies, minds, and souls together, she knew that she had all of me.